Marinade is a “sauce, typically made of oil, vinegar, spices, and herbs, in which meat, fish, or other food is soaked before cooking in order to flavor or soften it”. Port wine is not an ingredient I normally keep in the house, but I have marinated a pork tenderloin before so 7-18: Pork Tenderloin in Wine Sauce shouldn’t be too much of a challenge.

Meat that soaks in a marinade comes out tender and delicious. Cooking with this method requires more preparation time. Leave the meat in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours for maximum tenderness. The minimum marinating time I recommend is around 1 hour. When I prepared this recipe, I tried to make it in one night, so the meat marinated in the refrigerator for only 2 hours.

Only a few ingredients, but the cost of ingredients for this meal is definitely higher than most meals I make.

Prepare the marinade. Pour port wine and allspice onto the pork tenderloin in the bowl.

After an hour in the refrigerator, the port wine gets thicker and brighter. Flip the pork and set the bowl back in the refrigerator for an hour.

Here’s the fun part. Heat up the pan, put some butter in it and cook the pork on all sides. The pork in this photo has a crusty shell and I pour the reserved port wine marinade onto the meat to add flavor during cooking.

Cover the pan and cook the pork for about 20 minutes. A new saucepan we purchased came with a lid that fits this pan perfectly.

The sauce cooks down, coating the pork in the wine-y goodness. The pan drippings contain wine and pork fat, perfect for creating gravy.

Set the pork on a cutting board to rest before cutting into it. The color and texture of this tenderloin is a thing of beauty.

Add flour to the pan drippings to create a roux for gravy.

The roux paste looks gross before I add the half-and-half as a substitution for whipping cream.

Just before I stirred the gravy together.

Yummy…I served the tenderloin in a bowl to Jamie with some gravy on it. Pork tenderloin is one of my favorite cuts of meat and this recipe showed me how easy it is to make a sauce, adding lots of extra flavor, and a few extra calories, to a classic meal.